


Romance, East of the River

by Half_Life_Wolf



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe, Clichestuck, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-06-28
Updated: 2011-06-28
Packaged: 2017-10-20 20:04:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 19,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/216613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Half_Life_Wolf/pseuds/Half_Life_Wolf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which a young troll, employed as a cross-dressing prostitute by a delusional highblood, falls in love with his John, a sheltered human boy from the suburbs, and they endeavor through a series of increasingly unlikely shenanigans to build a new, better life together. Featuring several implied pailings, moirallegiances of both the functional and laughably incompetent type, two failed romances, three betrayals, many instances of underage substance abuse, one duel, and, just possibly, a happy ending. Or: STREETSTUCK.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. In Which John Egbert Has A Birthday

So you're eighteen now and you have fifty dollars of birthday money from your dearly beloved, mostly senile Nana burning a hole in your pocket and you've never been kissed. Never _really_ kissed, that is, because you and Dave Strider, who has been your best friend since he was the coolest kid on the playground and you were still trading jelly doughnuts for knuckle sandwiches-- both of you agreed that that one awful, awkward time with Rose during 'Seven Minutes in Heaven' when you were younger and there was a crowd of sugar-high preteens standing outside giggling didn't count. You're eighteen years old today, legally a man, and you've never felt another hand on your skin, soft and sensual and beckoning, never felt full, warm lips pressed against your own and then your jaw and then your neck, never held a girl close and whispered that you loved her, and meant it fully, implicitly, too guileless and naive to offer her falsehoods. The aforementioned Rose has many theories on this, none of which you are particularly interested in thanks to the low psychobabble-to-sense-making ratio involved. You think the last time she brought it up, she might have implied that you harbored some secret homosexual tendencies, which is just silly.

The aforementioned Strider, on the other hand, just thinks you need to get laid.

You know this because he told you so not nine and a half hours ago when the lunch bell was still ringing in your ears, and the two of you were on what used to be called the 'playground' and was then the 'black top' and is now the 'awful patch of cracked and dirty asphalt choked with weeds and the decaying remnants of a thousand children's dying dreams'. He cupped one hand over his mouth and you heard the metal _click, hiss_ of the lighter, opening and closing and giving air to the hungry flame, which jumped from fuel to the hand-rolled cigarette Dave held between his teeth, and then the gasp of his inhaled breath, sucking up smoke and ash, like lighting bits of paper on fire and sticking them in your mouth was going out of style and he wanted to get in as many as he could before the Irony Police showed up and impounded his stash. Then his lighter and one hand went in a pocket as the other leaned against the rust-red brick of the school's wall, and talking around his cigarette, he said, "You need to get laid, Egbert. Bad. Tonight."

Your face fell and your heart stopped but if you looked like a deer in the headlights he was either ignorant or pretended not to notice because when you whimpered "Please don't say it," he responded with, "We're doing this, bro."

Groaning, you pinched the bridge of your nose between two fingers and finished the meme dutifully, as you always do, knowing that you were hammering a nail into your own coffin with every word; "We're making this happen."

Which is why now it's ten o'clock at night and you're sitting in the passenger seat of Dave's 1978 Ford Pinto, with the window halfway down and the radio tuned to some alt rock screamo station, the dulcet tunes of an emotional teenager much like yourself reverberating against the inside of your skull as you readjust your position in a leather car seat that smells like a poorly taxidermied rat carcass. You went home and did your homework like a good little boy and told your dad you were going out celebrating with a friend (he was proud, as you knew he would be, and did no more than pat you on the back on your way out the door) and then Dave picked you up, and now the car is bouncing and shaking on its axles as you power through potholes deep enough to be portals to hell. There's a siren blaring in the near distance and as you coast to a stop at a red light, the car wheezing like an exhausted marathon runner sucking down cups of water past the finish line and the ticker tape parade, you chance to look out the window, regretting it immediately; this is the bad part of town, the place where the trolls rule, slumlords and gangbangers mixing it up with what could charitably be called "ladies of the night", a gaggle of whom are standing on the nearest street corner, illuminated by the pale neon blue light of a drug store sign in Alternian.

"Dave?" you ask, tentatively, and you get a noncommittal grunt in response as the car shifts gears and shudders into motion again. As you watch, one of the painted Jezebels winks at you, blowing you a kiss with lips as black as midnight, dark as sin. You shiver and sink back down in your seat-- you've never been a speciesist, but it surely seems very cosmopolitan, whores of both breeds standing outside together, all looking for a john. Or a John, even. Swallowing thickly, you press on. "Is there a reason we're in this part of town? Th-there must be, uh, strip clubs in my neighborhood."

Not their neighborhood, no, because this is where Dave lives, and everybody knows him. Before Dave can answer they're jerking to a stop again, this time in the middle of the street, to hoots and hollers from the sidewalk; there's no one else out driving, but Dave wouldn't care if there was, because the troll that skips over to lean against his window is Terezi Pyrope, his second best friend, and she's grinning like a lawyer. Or a shark. "I could smell this piece of trash coming from a mile away, Strider," she croaks, her English good but raspy and hoarse. Trolls are meant to growl like chicken wire raked over gravel, not contort their mouths into the strange patterns that human speech insists on. "Good little boys should be at home in their beds before the coppers come sniffing around."

Dave snorts, reaches back to unlock the backseat door and Terezi climbs in without a word more, having to hold the door shut behind her to keep it from flapping in the breeze. "Before you call them on me, you mean," he says, but lightly, and John feels his equilibrium thrown off as they turn a corner sharply. "Anyway, today's Egderp's birthday. Thought I'd show him some of the high life."

Terezi cackles and slaps her knee with her free hand, teeth glinting in the low light when you turn to nod back at her. "So where are we going, then?" she demands, madly gleeful. "Sully's? Sebastian Sam's Pleasure Paradise? The Cathouse? ...No, wait, Nepeta got us kicked out of there."

"Nah," Dave tells her, shaking his head slightly, and just like that he's pulling into a parking lot that can only be described as 'shady', killing the engine in a way that seems to make that metaphor literal. "Thought we'd try the Seaman's Harpoon. The new place."

"Dave, Dave, Dave," Terezi sighs, pulling a sour face at him and sounding disgusted in a way that only a troll can-- "We talked about this, didn't we? Fish puns, Dave. _Eridan,_ Dave. This is the exact opposite of anywhere a coolkid would go."

"Wrong and wrong again," Dave informs her, getting out, and you do too, scrambling to exit Satan's chariot, unwilling to be left behind. "My brother got a job here, so drinks are free. Anyway, it's not like Eridan's actually going to show _up_ just because he owns the place." Terezi still looks skeptical, but follows them out of the car and threads her arm through Dave's; the two of them take the lead and you follow, slouched down, trying to make yourself as small and unnoticeable as humanly possible. Dave and Terezi are in their own world already, laughing and talking and speaking in a language comprised of injokes and humor that you can only pretend to understand, and you're lost to it, able only to blindly follow the _tap, tap, tap_ of Terezi's cane against the ground and the low murmur of their idle chatter. Being ignored is better than being noticed, because if you draw Dave's attention, he might remember why the two of you are here.

The building you are walking towards is old, four stories, riverfront property long left languishing as time rotted it away to a brick facade and boarded up windows of top offices, a building that once shucked and processed and refined grain, making it fit for a consumer's use. Now it takes the dregs of human and troll society, the small and forgotten people with nowhere else to go, and strips them of their dignity like wheat from the chaff, cold and clinical, leaving nothing but a shell. You cannot help but find it poetic, and also sad, and you determine as you step through the high, once-gilded door, that you will not allow Dave to sell you any sort of illicit activity tonight. Whoever waits for you here deserves better.

There is no bouncer at the door, but the entryway is full of soft light and deep music, the bass lower than the ground in tones that shake your blood in its veins, rattles and curdles your marrow and plays a sensual note that kicks right down to your groin and rests there warmly, especially when Dave grabs you by the elbow and leads you forward into the main room. You come out on a balcony and step down the rickety stairs on shaking legs, into a pit filled with tables lit by candle light. Along one wall is a bar where shadowed figures drown their sorrows, and at the front of the room is a stage, lit in reds and yellows and oranges that flicker and dance-- the color of fire. Dave deposits you in what is easily the least comfortable chair you've ever had the displeasure of experiencing, turning you towards the stage.

Trolls, you notice. It's all trolls, and this room is making you lightheaded, filled with billowing clouds of smoke that could be marijuana or tobacco, take your pick, either is likely-- Dave would have known. Dave would have opened his mouth and breathed it in, tasted it like connoisseurs tasted wine, and declared its origin thusly, but now Dave is busy leaning in close to shout in your ear over the pounding music like a pulsing tumor in your soul. "It's all lowbloods," Dave tells you, and you think, _duh_ , because what high blood would fall to this level? The dancers, sparsely dressed as they are, are garbed in strips of brown or maroon or mustard yellow, sometimes stockings or bindings or skirts or stockings up long, supple legs that you want to caress or maybe that's just this music talking, yes, definitely the music. Your erstwhile companion waves to a man in blue hovering nearby, his long black hair hanging in waves over his shoulders, and shouts something else unintelligible; the man nods and departs, returning a sweat-soaked minute later with a tray of beverages, courtesy of the elder Strider.

"Drink this," Dave mouths, pushing something neon green with a skewer of fruit and a colorful paper umbrella at you, and you take the glass cautiously, steeling yourself. The glass is cold, and the room is hot, stifling, as though the heat were a liquid pouring in over your skin and into your clothes, sticking the cloth to your suffocating body, and you dearly wish not to be here in mind or body so you gulp and drink the hemlock, all of it down in one gulp that leaves your throat burning and your mouth tasting pleasantly of mint-berry-kiwi-razmatazz-rainbows. Unbidden, the man brings you another, and when that's gone there's, poof, another glass before you just like that. Terezi is on her second round of something that looks like pureed blue raspberry fruit gushers if gushers were a color blue whose electricity makes the hairs on your arms stand on end just from being in close proximity, and Dave is slurping something that you are disappointed to find that you can easily identify as whiskey sour, on the rocks. Two drinks, now three, and your head is buzzing and filled with white noise and the music is only getting louder and that's when _she_ comes on stage.

You don't know her name, but you dearly wish to. Hell, maybe she doesn't have one. What she does have is long legs encased in bright red stockings held up by garter belts that you can see beneath her skirt, and horns like two pieces of succulent candy corn that you suddenly want to lick and suck and devour (you're possibly the only person you know who actually likes candy corn, has always thought it was delicious), and intense eyes that smoulder. The other dancers are gone by the time she comes out, to catcalls from the few patrons in the audience tonight, but she shrugs it off and runs a hand through her short-for-a-girl hair, gloved to hide the maneater claws beneath the fabric. As she sidles up to the pole, embraces it like a lover, runs her tongue over the cold metal, you realize that her clothes, from the stockings to the corset strapped tight over her flat-but-attractive chest to the stiletto'd fuck-me pumps holding her half a foot off the ground, her clothes are all red as scarlet, red as human blood.

Her eyes, those powerful eyes, draw you in and watch you for a moment-- not the crowd, but _you_ and it takes your breath away as she watches you, no condemnation there, but pride, battered and weary and hidden but pride nonetheless that burns like the flame of the forgotten soldier, never extinguished, never quenched, always hungry. For a moment there is nothing in the world but you and her and then she begins in earnest, pushing her hips against the pole, raising a leg to hook around it, pulling it to her as though it were a lover, a matesprit or... what was the other one? A kismesis. Still, you cannot look away, enraptured. She is perfection, whispers the voice of the alcohol in the back of your head, tendrils of thought wrapping around the lizard part of your brain, making your pants too tight.

You have never wanted anything more in your life than this.

Dave sees you watching, and gestures towards the steward again; the music is lower now, and you can hear him say, "Hey, Equius. We've got a winner."

Out the corner of your eye, you see but do not notice the man as he inclines his head slightly, cracked sunglasses slipping an inch down his steep nose. "Very good, sir." And then a clawed hand is over your shoulder. "If you would...?" You do not want to, do not wish to go, but the burly troll is easing you up out of your seat and the drink tells you to go, to follow. Your feet are slow and unresponsive, and it's like walking in molasses as you stumble and trip after him, leaning against his side as he brings you back up the one fight of stairs and then another, into a dingy hallway where the music is muffled and all you can smell is failure. The room at the end of the hall is marked '612' in lopsided, tarnished brass numbers and the steward opens it carefully with a ring of keys from his pocket, gently nudging you forward. "Please wait here," is the only instruction you are given, and you are okay with that, moving forward to collapse on the small but well-made bed you find there, taking a moment to turn on the bedside light.

In the intervening time, while you wait for things unknown, you count the water stains like diseased and withered blossoms on the ceiling like stars in the sky, aching for a girl you will never know. Life is hard, and no one understands, but stupid as it may be, you can't help but think that she could have.

The door creaks, badly in need of oil, but you don't look up until a gruff, overtired voice grunts, "Well, let's get on with it, then. Sit up with your legs over the edge and take your pants off, unless you're too drunk to do it." You do as directed, the first two steps at least with a couple of false starts, and blink in surprise-- here is your fantasy, come back to you, the girl in red who up close is a lot more angular, more sharp. You watch as she unthreads her corset, sighing in nearly inaudible relief as it tumbles to the floor in a pool of restricting cotton, and then, enraptured, as she unclasps her skirt and that goes too, revealing a pair of red silk panties and a very obvious bulge. Alright, so, not a girl. Right now, you are just a little bit too drunk to care, and anyway, she's still pretty.

You tell him so and he mutters, "Yeah, definitely too drunk," in hissing English under his breath and bends to his knees before you, sure fingers covering yours over your belt buckle, teasing it out of its loops before unbuttoning and unzipping your pants. The flat of his hand butts up against your hard cock, and even over the material of your underwear it's more than you've done with any living being before; a shameful, small noise escapes you, and you realize again that this is not what you wanted. He's pretty, he's beautiful, attractive and wonderful and those eyes are watching you but this isn't what your first time is supposed to be, because you don't love him. You think you could. You know you could, actually, but now you can't because you don't know a damn thing about him, don't even know what name to scream when he finally gets around to pulling your cock out of your boxers and pressing a wet and careful kiss against the tip, mindful of his teeth as the tip of his tongue digs into the slit there, making you keen.

So you ask. You can't not, not when his hand, still gloved, is wrapped around your shaft and you realize that you want to feel his skin on your skin, hot and rough like living sandpaper, like a cat's tongue. It takes you a moment to find the words, and then you have to gently take hold of his hair and pull him back so that you won't be distracted. "What's your name?" Three little words that sound so stupid in your mouth, echoing off the stained and empty walls.

He scowls, sitting back on his heels to watch you with disdain barely concealed, knowing that you are too drunk to complain or hold back his pay, too drunk to get him fired. "What the fuck do you want that for?" he growls, and it's like music, wonderful music, you could cry because the tone is harsh and you know why and you wish you could wrap him up in blankets and carry him home like the broken baby bird you found in the park when you were six, take him home and nurse him back to health and knit the fractures in his heart back together, but it's not that simple. "To take everything, the last thing? Strip the last pieces of me away? To own me? I've got news for you, fuckass-- someone already does, and he sure as hell isn't you."

There is fire in his eyes and tears pricking at your own and you try to haul him up to your level but with your coordination it results in you falling off the bed, tumbling forward and onto him and bowling him over onto his back on the floor with a whoosh of lost breath, your face buried in the crook of his neck smelling the strange perfume of trolls, the cocktail of differing pheromones that makes you clumsily dig the heel of your hand into his side, clutching him tightly. "N-no, I just..." you stammer, stupidly, wanting to explain, to make him love you or at least not hate you, take away the pain and the indignity. "I just want to know the name of the guy who's gonna take my virginity. 'S all."

"You mean you've never filled pails with anyone before?" he demands, incredulous, his own hands traveling to your shoulders and stopping there, not pushing you off quite yet but not holding you closer, either. "This is your first time?" Then he scoffs and rolls you over, gets to his feet and hauls you up like a sack of potatoes, tossing you back onto the bed. "Well aren't I fucking lucky."

"Sorry," you whisper, because it seems like the right thing to do, and then there is a warm tongue wrapped around the head of your cock and a steadying hand resting on your thigh and all the world is heat and darkness and the throbbing beat of the music below and sadness, sadness heavy like a curtain, like a curse.

Afterward he collapses beside you and you watch his adam's apple bob as he swallows you down, spatters of indecent white on his lips and chin that he doesn't seem to notice, or at least to acknowledge. His eyes close and he turns on his side, and so do you, embracing him from behind; he doesn't fight it, lets you hold him close, his bony back pressed to your chest as your heart beats like a hummingbird's wings. "Do you hate them?" you ask, less slurred now that your arousal is gone, and he stiffens, shocked, taking a moment to think.

"Too much work," he tells you after a beat of not-quite silence, and you can hear his rasping breath when the two of you are quiet, labored and shallow. "They don't deserve it, anyway." You let your eyes slip shut and stroke his chest, his stomach, rewarded with something like a thin purr, and it must be involuntary because he sounds annoyed when he asks, "So what the fuck are you doing here for your first time, anyway? You look pitiful enough to find a matesprit, or whatever damn stupid thing you humans do."

"Didn't want any of them," you hum, your cheek pressed against his shoulder blade. "Wanted you."

Another snort. "You didn't even know me."

"Sure I did," you say without thinking, without knowing why. "Trolls aren't the only ones who believe in fate."

Neither of you speak again for the rest of the night, not until sleep takes you. "It's Karkat," he whispers. "Karkat Vantas." And you fall to the dream with a smile.

\---

When you wake up, there is pale sunlight streaming over your face and the comforter that neither of you quite made it under, and your mouth is filled with fur and your head with _fuck, fuck, fuck._ You remember what happened as a blur of sound and sensation, but the last part is clear, and you remember that you meant it, too. Probably you still do.

Sitting up, your unresisting hands are filled with a steaming cup of something thick and chocolate colored that a rough voice proclaims to be called something with too many s's and z's to be pronounceable at nine thirty in the morning on a Tuesday (you think it's Tuesday, anyway). Taking a sip, you find this one to be berry-pomegranate-tangerine-gravy flavored, which is a better combination than you'd have been inclined to suspect, and the voice further explains that "It's a troll drink, good for hangovers." Physically, you feel better already.

Then you are quiet until the cup is drained. You find that you can't look up at him, afraid to see loathing there. "How much for the night?" you ask, knowing that you will never be able to pay, and slight movement in that direction shows you that he is shrugging, uncertain.

"New customer discount. Call it fifty for the night?" 

Amazed at this fortune, you find your pants and dig through the lint-encrusted pockets, coming up with the fifty-spot and passing it over. Still, you cannot meet those eyes that you have wronged just by existing.

"You have anywhere to be?" he asks, and you can't answer, fascinated by the pattern in the wood grain in the floor. "Hey, look at me, I asked you a question. You got anywhere to go, kid?" Now you do look up because he sounds frustrated, and in the light of day, yes, he is older than you, just a year or two but enough to make a difference, to melt some of the extra baby fat off his face and make his arms, covered by a jacket now, long and lean. Gone is the skirt, which you realize was for the benefit of the human customers, trolls having no concept of either sexuality or fashion, replaced by a beaten up pair of blue jeans with one of the knees torn out. He doesn't look angry-- more than slightly angry, at least. Just tired, and you nod.

"Yeah, school."

" _Jegus,_ " he groans, slapping a hand over his face and squinching up his eyes, trying to block out the vision of his shitty life. "Kid, fuck, _please_ tell me you're legal, it's not like the boss cares but fuck him some of us have morals and I'm not a grubfucking pervert like some of us around here--"

You get up to your feet hurriedly, eyes wide, shaking your head so hard that your neck cracks. "No! No, don't worry, yesterday was my birthday. It's my last year of high school, that's all."

He cocks his head at you suspiciously, but accepts it, still scowling, and marches over to a previously unnoticed chest of drawers, removing from the top portion his own ring of keys. "You got any way to get there, then?"

"No," you admit sheepishly, hating yourself for it; "I just had enough to cover, um, 'services'. Dave was going to drive me back..."

"Dave? Dave Strider?" You now, and he guffaws, not entirely unkindly. "Yeah, good luck there. The other Strider probably made him leave the second his shift was over-- that or he's passed out in some other room." The man-- Karkat, Karkat from now on, you must remember --had walked halfway to the door, but now glances at you over his shoulder; "Come on, then, I guess I might as well drive you. Not like I have a day job to get to or anything." His eyes travel down your body. "But fuck, make yourself decent first or you'll end up owing me another fifty before we even get out the door."

Sadly, you cannot tell if that is a joke, or if you want it to be.

Pants acquired, you hastily follow in Karkat's wake as he draws you back into the hall, back down the stairs, across the pit floor now empty with the house lights on, a lone janitor mopping up the night's excess as the trolls go back to their rooms to sleep the day away. They exit through a service egress in back, out onto what used to be a loading dock in the golden olden days, down another flight of stairs (cement, cracking, circa 1862) and into the same parking lot, where Dave's car is not. Karkat's car is basically the same, though-- a worn-out, unwanted model, much like him.

He gestures towards the door and you slide in shotgun, buckling yourself in and leaning against the door while the engine turns over twice and stalls. Karkat curses violently and thumps the dash, his cheeks flushing, perhaps embarrassed and wanting to show his dominion over the car; after a moment of verbal and physical violence it roars and sputters to life, and they're off.

"It's across the river," you tell him helpfully. "Greenridge High?"

"Yeah, I know it," he tells you, voice unreadable. "I used to go there."

You would dearly love to say something else, but the words stick in your throat, and after a moment he turns the radio on to a station broadcasting all in troll. Troll singing is often likened to the screeches of dueling wolverines, but today it is slow dirges that you do not have to have translated to know are love ballads, black or red. They do not compliment the noises of the engine, of the tires rolling over loose stone and onto pavement as you exit the parking lot.

The city is dead at mid morning. Empty and still save for the occasional plastic bag caught in the wind like tumbleweed, and it reminds you of pictures you'd seen of the city of Pompeii after mighty Vesuvius blew its top, sans lava-- this moment in time, preserved, unchanging, while somewhere the rest of the world moves around it. Karkat's knuckles are white and bloodless as he grips the steering wheel, his face set, and you wish you could pause him, too, pin him like a butterfly to a piece of cardboard and hold him behind glass, preserve him in amber to keep him safe. At the first red light, you ease his right hand off the wheel and coax it onto the seat between you, slipped effortlessly into yours, and he stares straight ahead but does not resist, holding on to you, too, for dear life.

The car stops. You relinquish your hold and get out, and all of this happens in slow motion, each frame painstakingly captured by the camera of your eye, slowing time itself. You slam the door, walk around to his side of the car and he rolls the window down, leaning out to look at you. "Thanks for the ride," you say, stupidly, and he nods, preparing to push down on the gas, drive right back out of your life. And you know, you _know_ that you will never see him again. No matter how many times you go back to the bordello, no matter how hard you look and search and scour, he will be gone, lost to you. "Wait," you cry, and he does, eyes narrow but expectant, lips tight and thin as you struggle with your pockets to find the pen you remember slipping there.

"Hold out your arm," you command, and he does; you roll up the denim sleeve of his jacket to reveal ashen skin and uncap the pen, hastily but legibly scribbling down digits. "That's... that's my number. You can call me. Um. If you want to. My dad might pick up, but just ignore him, haha." You laugh and then frown, serious. "Wait, that could really happen, it's not all that funny. Uh." You gulp, watch his face go from impassive to merely guarded, and you are drowning in those eyes again, riptide pulling you in deep because what you see there is not hatred or loathing. It's pity. Pity for a boy who has nothing else, who allowed himself to be drugged and have his money taken from him in a dark and dirty room by a man he'd never known before. Pity for a boy who thought he was in love with a man who could give him nothing but moments of fleeting pleasure, and nothing more.

You think you can accept that, for now.

"Shut up," he tells you, but his voice is soft like poisoned satin, his thick accent melting away to almost nothing.

"Okay," you say, dumbly, because what else is there but that, and you turn as the engine turns over, looking towards a school of people who are bright and happy and whole, as you were, as Dave and this man, Karkat, have never been. "I can pay," you add to the wind, to no one in particular. "But I really don't want to have to."

He laughs again, and now the sound is different, high and clear and genuine; he sounds as surprised about that as you are. "Go to class, kid."

"When you call, ask for John!" you shout after the retreating car. "John Egbert, don't forget!" He waves back at you out the window, and the sound of his laughter follows you back to school, where Dave is waiting for you, waiting to laugh and slap you on the back and call you a man. Teasingly ask you what it feels like to be a homosexual. But you will never tell him, no matter how good a friend he is-- these things, these small and sacred things, are yours.

And, perhaps, Karkat's as well.


	2. In Which Karkat Makes a Phone Call and Also Dinner

April is the worst month, when the world can't decide if it wants to be cloudy or if it wants to shine, weak sunlight glinting off hubcaps and puddles of glistening rainbow turpentine in the street, off water that _drip, drip, drip_ s from the gutters and the ceiling, off brass knuckles and new plasma television sets passed out broken windows by clawed hands to a laughtrack of hyena cackling. May isn't better, when the rain really starts in earnest and the storm clouds hang thick as rolled cotton in the air, ominous and lingering, purple thunderheads spreading sick across the sky turning the air itself the color of a bruise on pale and pallid human skin-- and then it will be summer. Summer is the worst, hot and sticky and there's no air conditioning in your building and you sweat so much but it doesn't carry off the shame; you can't sweat out the hatred and the general malaise and sometimes you think you're going crazy, always did even when you were little and thought you knew better, thought you had the world figured out and locked up safe. Even then it was all red like the lights at the street corners and your blood and the damn oily lipstick you apply each night without fail, red behind your eyes and under your skin and burning boiling until you raked your claws down your arms just to let it out.

Summer.

But now it's April, the worst month, and you have a dollar twenty-five in small change in your pocket for the laundromat later and a phone call now, because your nerves have been eating you alive and this is stupid and your heart is beating like you're going through catastrophic withdrawal and about to collapse, one hand deep in your pocket jangling and feeling up the coins as you walk, making sure it's all there, enough for a short call at least. Two quarters, a nickel, six dimes and ten pennies exactly, plus three bus tokens and a Sacajawea dollar that no vending machine within a twelve block radius will be persuaded to accept. The pay phone is out in front of the local pharmacy, hanging off the hook due to carelessness or gross negligence, and the first of the quarters and two of the dimes go clink, clink as you push them through the slot with shaking, skin-cracked fingers. Then you cradle the receiver between your cheek and your shoulder, holding it in place as you roll up your shirt sleeve, holding your arm out before you.

"Hey!" Fuck. Ignore her, she'll go away. "Hey, Vantas!" Go away, go away, go away. "I know you can hear me, I can smell your waffling from over here. It's pathetic. Also: shower before coming outside next time, you smell like a whorehouse."

Or maybe she won't. Rolling your eyes, you slam the phone back down and turn to deal with her, ignoring the sound of your change being regurgitated back out of the machine behind you. "The fuck are you doing out here anyway, Pyrope?" you demand, crossing your arms over your chest and giving her your best scowl, which is, you remember, entirely lost on a blind girl. Fuck but you're an idiot. "Shouldn't you be off terrorizing small children or tying woofbeasts to bottle rockets or something?"

She cackles back at you, but there's an edge to it, hard and sharp but muffled by silk, waiting to lash out and cut you. "Maybe I just wanted to see your pretty face, huh?"

"Yeah, whatever. You looking for Gamzee? I think he's hanging out at River and Main today. Special sale on sopor, not that that'll do Strider any good."

Her face twitches, as though she's unsure whether to be angry or amused, and then breaks out in a predatory grin, all teeth and malice and heady spite. "I'm not his drug runner."

You snort derisively, returning to your deposited coins and the prospect of your phone call. The number on your arm is faded now, nearly washed away despite several reapplications that you didn't worry about because there was no need to cover something that no one would ever be looking at in the first place when there were so many more attention-grabbing points of interest on deliberate display, but you can still read it, and that's all that matters. 4, 1, 3, you begin to dial, the area code for the better part of town where the the river doesn't run slick and stained with a fine patina of despair, only half paying attention to the girl standing behind you on the curb, tapping her foot at you. "Yeah, you're right," you say, punching in a few more numbers. "You're his whore."

"You know what they say about sluts in glass houses, Vantas," she tells you in a sing-song voice that hides daggers. You just roll your shoulders, shrugging it off, but she makes that impossible by coming around to lean against the phone box, one shoulder in contact with tarnished chrome that reflects danger in deceptive packaging.

Feeling childish and boxed in and small, you stick your tongue out at her and wave her off, the phone ringing tinnily in the near distance as your palms sweat, your heart thumps. Your claws clack against the phone's scuffed black casing nervously, ignoring how she scoffs at you, flouncing off to make more mischief. Everything seems to slow down for a long moment, and you consider-- why is it, exactly, that you are doing this? You know why the kid wants _you_ , of course, the same reason that any human man comes into the cramped and crumbling establishment that you've sold away your life to-- because rough gray skin under fingertips and sharp teeth wrapped under leathery black lips are a novelty, something new and different and exciting, a relatively tame thrill that, nine times out of ten, involves exactly no risk at all. To them you are exotic, wild, untouchable, barely more than an animal built for fighting and killing and fucking, tamed by circumstances and defanged for their pleasure.

That, you can understand. It makes you sick, but you understand, because you have the uncomfortable feeling sometimes in the middle of the night when the terrors come for you and you try not to let your convulsions wake whatever unfortunate is sharing your bed that you would be no different, if yours was the dominant species here. What you don't understand is why you didn't scrub his number off your arm the second you got home that day, wash and scrape at the skin until nothing was left but streaks of red and an aching pain to remind you that nothing is yours, nothing is good. Calling him is like admitting defeat, admitting that you have committed the cardinal sin of _wanting_ , of suddenly giving a fuck about someone who isn't yourself and thereby putting your continued survival in jeopardy. Your heart pounds as the phone rings for a fourth time, swallowing thickly around a tongue as dry as bones in the desert, your free hand balled to a fist, sharp nails puncturing the meat of your palms. The sting is distracting, but not enough.

Finally, a click. A pause, then, "Hello?" A male voice, older, maybe around forty you'd say if forced to guess, the sort of voice that invites mental images of stately middle-management figures in striped ties and starched, pressed white shirts as stainless as their reputations, who take you out back at night and force you to your knees in the alley out back, kneeling in broken glass and cigarette butts because they don't have time for anything proper. Bile rises in your throat-- "Hello?" again, confusion evident in the man's tone, and you revise your opinion; he sounds befuddled, kindly, harmless. The sort of person who would bake cakes on a son's wriggling day and pat his friends on the head and return home to a loving wife whose doughy body three times a month would more than satisfy his needs.

You swallow again, and panic, trying to think of something, anything to say, some comforting lie to offer. 'I'm friends with your son,' you could tell him, but then he would ask where John knew you from, and why he'd never seen you before. Nor can you pretend to be a tutor, or working on a science project with him, or anything, anything that would convince this man to give you five minutes of his son's time.

"Hello? Is anyone there?"

 _No_ , you think to yourself, disgusted, as you set the receiver back in its cradle with shaking hands, revulsion at your own behavior tearing at you. _No one is._

Terezi's sightless eyes are still on you, unseeing but knowing everything, as you walk away, feeling smaller and more filthy than ever before.

\---

The phone rings for you one day in May, with flowers and sunshine giving way to torrential rains that pound the windows like bullet shells as Dave sprawls out on your bed, sucking down smoke, shades hiding his red and bloodshot eyes. You don't judge, you really don't, but the smell is choking, and you glare at him impotently before going to attend to your gentleman caller, one hand on the doorway. "Dude, come on, can you not do that when I can't open the window? Dad's going to smell that when he gets home."

Dave just shrugs and takes another puff, the cocky asshole. "Not like he'd give a fuck. 'Oh, son, your first joint venture, I'm so fucking proud I could just die'."

So you leave him there to his gratuitous substances and nearly skip down the stairs to the kitchen where the phone is vibrating practically off the hook. A month. It's been nearly a month and nothing, but you hold out hope every time the phone rings, blindly wishing that it might be for you. It never is, always telemarketers or wrong numbers or your father's business clients, and every time it isn't you suffer another tiny cut to the soul-- they're beginning to stack up. Hope burns eternal, though, and you are nearly breathless with anticipation by the time you wrestle the phone to your ear. "Hello?" For a moment silence greets you, and your heart sinks-- another hang-up call. But there is heavy breathing on the other line, and it occurs to you that he might be as nervous as you are, desperate indeed if he's sunk to the level of actually calling you. "Karkat?" you ask, tentatively, quietly, not wanting to be wrong again.

"This is stupid," the rough voice on the other end tells you immediately, and your knees go weak as you exhale a breath you hadn't known you were holding. And he's right, it is stupid, because you're not a homosexual and you have a prim, perfect, clean-cut life that doesn't involve trolls, and certainly doesn't involve prostitutes. You are going to attend a prestigious state university next fall and graduate in the upper quarter of your class in six weeks. You grew up on a street of little pink houses, where cheerful Stepford wives planted plastic gardens and dressed their darlings in Abercrombie&Fitch sports coats for a day at the park, where miles of white picket fences replaced red tape and no one ever drove up in a car that came used. All your life you have been separate, part of something better, connected only by the thin thread of Dave Strider, and you liked it that way, unaware that there are other options.

But the fact is that none of that feels real to you now. For the last month you've fallen asleep thinking of how nice it had been to have another warm body cuddled up against you, horns and claws and monster movie teeth and all, imagining the beat of the music through the floor and the vibrations of his chest against your hands. And the worst part is that you meant it, everything you said. You do believe in fate, even if you never would have expected it to lead you here, the duplicitous bitch. Fate is, in fact, probably the one aspect of troll culture you entirely subscribe to and approve of. Troll romance, with its emphasis on hatred and other such negative emotions, is both foreign and uncomfortable to you, but the idea of fated partners, one person you are destined to know and love, if only for a short time-- that is so painfully romantic that you cannot help but believe in its truth. The alternative is believing that everyone stumbles through life with the lights off, perhaps never knowing their soul mate, and you can't handle that, do not want it to be true.

"Don't hang up," you beg him, your voice quiet and broken, trying not to alert Dave to the contents of your conversation. He would never understand. None of them would. "Please. I... I wanted to talk to you."

"Yeah? About what?" his voice is begrudgingly curious now. You wonder where he is, if he has his own phone or is out on the corner in the rain somewhere, suffering to talk to you. There is thunder in the background, or that could be your own wildly palpitating heart.

You laugh, tonelessly, hopelessly, leaning back against the marble countertop, watching rain drench your backyard through the sliding glass door, the kitchen bathed in shadows save for the oven clock, blinking 12:00 perpetually like every VCR in the house because both you and your father are too clueless to figure out how to reset it. "I don't know."

"Well, figure it out. Christ, if I'd known you didn't have your shit together enough to figure out how to properly proposition someone, I never would have called in the first place." Now you can definitely hear rustling on the other end, like he's moving to hang up and walk out of your life again, and suddenly your blood turns to ice water in your veins.

"Wait!" you command, and he does, obedient, though you get the feeling you're sorely trying his patience. "I... I want to see you again. Is that okay?"

Karkat hesitates, but sighs and after a moment growls. "Yeah, fine, sure. Are you free tomorrow morning? Like, around ten?"

"Yes," you say immediately, even though today is a Wednesday in May and you almost certainly have school tomorrow. He snorts, knowing this, and you have the uncomfortable suspicion that you've just been tricked.

"Don't fucking lie to me, you have school."

Your eyes slip closed, shamefully, as your cheeks heat and you cling to the phone a bit harder, your stomach sinking. "I'm free tomorrow," you repeat, your voice half choked with a nameless emotion fast approaching desperation. "I'm free any day."

This time you cannot parse the tone of the silence that hangs heavy between you, a curtain, cutting him off from your mental sight. "Ten o'clock, corner of Castle and Lake. Don't be late." And then silence, the low hiss of dead air.

"Who was that?" Dave drawls, bored, as you come back up the stairs.

"No one," you tell him, looking away, unable to meet your own eye in the mirrored fronts of his glasses.

\---

The number 42 crosstown bus is packed with all sorts of strange people at nine-thirty on a Thursday morning, and you've decided that if this is in any way an accurate cross-section of the sort of people who inhabit Dave's neighborhood, you are amazed that he managed to make it to legal adulthood without getting stabbed, shot, burned, beaten, kidnapped or eaten. Only half of them are trolls, some wearing their symbols on gold chains around their neck, strings of misplaced teeth like stolen crockery adorning their wrists-- the rest are humans, mostly older, wrapped in rags with medical bags in their purses and briefcases, one with a bottle of moonshine in a paper bag as though that would fool anybody. The driver's seat is behind a box of glass, separating him from the rest of the possibly dangerous and mentally disturbed passengers. One of the trolls, a greenblood if the curving symbol on his shirtsleeve is to be believed, leers at you when you get on raising a lip to reveal a row of shark's teeth, and you sink down into the first seat available, pressing yourself into the stained material to avoid his curious gaze.

You get off just as soon as you can, as soon as the bus crosses the river, and walk the ten blocks to Castle and Lake between buildings that do not stand on the street so much as crouch, all storefront windows with bars over them and disintegrating brick facades. It's exactly two minutes and thirty seconds after ten in the morning when you arrive at the small Alternian grocery at the corner of Castle Avenue and Lake Street, and no one is waiting for you there. The sidewalk is as empty as this part of the city is expected to be during the daytime, when all the good little trolls are safe abed and the humans are off working shitty jobs at whatever low-rent institutions will have them, and you feel more alone now than you ever have, and a little scared. You have a knife in your pocket, the slim folding kind that Dave gave you for your birthday last year, noting that you never know when having a dirty little secret could come in handy, but you have no idea how to use it or even what button to press to make the blade spring out, and this is legitimately frightening to you, as well it should be.

With nothing else to do, you take a seat on the curb, your face in your hands as you contemplate the wreckage of your life, horror bubbling up in your stomach. And then, behind you, a small _ding_ sounds as the door swings open and a voice growls, "What did I fucking tell you about being late?"

"Just two minutes, man, cool your jets," you grump, getting up and bouncing over to him, but you can't hide your smile or your nervous energy at seeing him again, and you don't really want to, either. Karkat isn't hunched over this time, not slouching, trying to make himself smaller in your sight-- now he stands tall, black jean jacket over a white t-shirt, blue jeans and scuffed sneakers and hands shoved awkwardly in his pocket, like any other college-age kid off the street. He could have been anyone, anyone normal, could have been one of the few male trolls in your graduating class, for that matter, save that he isn't wearing his symbol anywhere on his person, and this time you can clearly identify the emotion you are feeling as joy, unfettered and only slightly tainted by circumstances. You hover close to him, grinning widely, and he watches you for a moment before turning on his heel again and marching back into the store, beckoning you with a careless toss of his head to follow.

"Yeah, well, I thought for a second there you weren't coming," he mutters, grabbing a twisted wire basket and taking off towards aisle three, recognizable only because Alternian numerals are more or less the same as yours. The sign is utterly incomprehensible, even with two years of elementary high school courses in trollish, but there are multicolored boxes all around; it looks like the candy aisle. Or the pasta aisle, maybe, you revise your opinion as he breaks open a box of something and sniffs it, revealing what look to be long, thin sticks of pressed and dried material. "Wouldn't be the first time I've been stood up."

You frown at him, pouting, and grab a plastic package off the shelf to distract yourself, one of those floppy, oblong bags that disappointment-size Halloween chocolate bars come in, with a cartoon of a smiling, happy grub on the front. The transparent viewing window shows a Technicolor variety of gummy worms, pressed and shaped into morbid effigies of baby trolls, perfectly formed and life-size for newly hatched grubs, as wriggly and slimy as anything else you'd find in the primordial caves Karkat's kind first crawled out of and into the daylight-- you're not sure whether they look delicious or vomit inducing. You pull a disconcerted face, putting the package back hastily. "Aw, come on, bro, that's not fair. Didn't I say I wanted to see you?"

"Let me tell you something fascinating about humans, Egbert," Karkat sighs, putting his own package back on the shelf, not looking at you. "Sometimes, they lie."

"I don't," you tell him, getting nothing but silence and static and the quiet elevator music emanating from the store's speaker system in return, and the both of you meander over to the produce section without another word exchanged. Karkat looks over the wares with disappointment and frustration in his eyes, sifting through piles of wilted and browning root vegetables with a look of soured concentration, and you don't bother him further, instead wandering a few feet beyond to poke at packages of saran-wrapped meat that bleeds more colors than just red, slabs of things that humans would never consider ingesting languishing on cardboard over chipped ice. Next to that is a wrack of beverages, some in clear glass bottles that reveal leaf powder suspended in muddy solution or water colored with red and green and black, others in space-age gel pouches with pictures of unidentifiable fruits in front. One bottle has advertising in English as well as Trollish, and you lean in close to read, pulling away with a look of utmost revulsion when the type is revealed to read "Grub Juice! 100% natural guaranteed!"

Karkat's biting laughter brings you back to reality, makes you flush, and he grins at you only half mockingly, arms folded over his chest; "See anything you like?" The clinical fluorescent lighting of the store bathes his face in chiaroscuro, glinting off teeth and claws, bringing him out of the shadow and into your sight, and for a minute all you can think to say is _You_ ,  _Karkat_. You recover enough to shake your head hard, and then, before you know it, his hand is on your arm, gripping you just above the elbow, tugging you insistently towards the cashier's desk. "Well, come on, then. It's getting late and I have to work tonight."

You frown again, allowing yourself to be obediently lead up to the line, where Karkat nods at the brown-blooded cashier and unloads his basket, ignoring you. "You work tonight?" you ask dumbly, repeating, because that... hadn't occurred to you. You'd thought he'd suggested this time so that you would be awake when he was, trolls being nocturnal, but this makes more sense; Karkat is working you into his schedule, and the thought is both touching that he would stay up so late to see you, and uncomfortable that he would have to do that at all. You're not ashamed of him, you tell yourself-- of course not, you can't find it in yourself to be ashamed of someone so beautiful, who you instinctively know that you love already. You just wish things could be better for him, that you were the rich fairy tale prince who could buy back his freedom and set him loose, save him from dirty, diseased men with fumbling fingers who beat him down, use him, throw him away. Karkat deserves better than that.

Better than you, if you are being perfectly honest.

"I work every night," Karkat tells you, offhandedly, like it's not a big thing-- and maybe for him it isn't, on the outside. Maybe he can delude himself into thinking that it doesn't matter, that sex without emotion isn't even really sex at all, only a service provided. But he glances at you out of the corner of his eye, quick and fleeting, so fast you easily could have missed it, searching for any hint or trace of condemnation in you, daring you to look down on him, to spit on him for it like everyone else. The total rings up to twenty-five dollars even, and as he reaches for his wallet you rest your hand on his arm, comforting, the best show of solidarity you think he'd be comfortable with in a public space.

It's hard to recognize the neighborhood in the light of day, but after Karkat has taken his flimsy paper bag of goods that may or may not be fit for human consumption, he takes your hand and pulls you outside, around the corner, and down a street you think you know. Two blocks pass in emptiness, awkward silence compensated for with the touch of his skin against yours, and then you can smell the river up ahead, walking into the cool wind. It tousles Karkat's already messy hair and you giggle, moreso when he gives you a nonplussed look, and he doesn't seem to know what to do with the grin you give him right back, all happiness and buckteeth. You feel like any other young man in love, at that moment, coming home for lunch with your boyfriend, which is silly because you don't even know what he is to you, yet. This feels like a good and promising start, though.

At least until you reach the bordello. This building, you can readily identify, the only cultural landmark of the slums that sticks in your mind, looming on the skyline, a sinister presence. "Karkat...?" you begin, cautiously, not wanting to put him off or make him snap. "Do you... live here?"

The corners of his mouth tug down as the two of you cross the street to the big building, heading for the same service door you left from all those days ago. "Yeah, so what if I do? I can't exactly afford the Taj Mahal over here, okay? _He_ lets me live here for free."

"Who--" you start, lips forming the words, but suddenly he's in front of you and deadly close, his forehead pressed up against yours, and those passionate eyes are so close and you can feel his hot breath against your lips and you realize that still, even now, you have never been kissed.

"Let's not fucking talk about that right now," he hisses, a whine of desperation buried in there somewhere deep. "Okay?" You nod and lean forward a fraction, aching for some other touch, some other warm and heavy pressure against your skin, but he pulls back and continues on. The building is quiet, and deserted, no music bleeding through the floor this time as you ascend through a damp, dimly lit stairwell, onto the landing. Karkat unlocks the door and pushes you into his room, which by light of day (and without a hangover to beat the band) you notice is rather... nice. Homey. Clean, not a lot of personal touches, but not as grimy as you would have expected either; there's an alarm clock on the counter and a framed picture of Will Smith on the bedside table, a small refrigerator designed for use in a dorm room humming gently in the corner. Karkat sets his groceries on a somewhat larger table with one chair pushed into it and removes a hot plate from where it rests atop the refrigerator, setting it next to the bag and plugging it in to charge.

While it heats up, he removes a pot from the cupboard and presses it into your hands, gesturing back towards the door. "Bathroom's down the hall. Fill that halfway up with water."

You make a face at him, disgusted. "Ugh. That's not sanitary, dude."

He shrugs. "I'm going to boil it, that'll kill the germs. Anyway, do you want lunch or not?" The last bit is snapped, as though he finds your questioning to be a touch ungrateful, and not wanting to seem unappreciative you duck out of the room. The bathroom is at the end of the hall, as directed, and this room _is_ exactly what you would expect, every appliance and fixture caked in brown residue. The tap squeaks as you twist the nob and the pipes groan and protest for a full minute before spitting out a rush of water tinted with rust, drops of which spatter on your forearms as you rush to jam the pot into the sink. The resulting fluid is capped with froth in a really very suspect way, and you are very unsure about the prospect of eating anything cooked in this, but you are trying hard to appreciate Karkat's hospitality, even if you've never eaten troll food before and the whole endeavor seems mightily suspect.

Karkat is busy chopping vegetables and shredding hunks of meat when you return, and takes the pot without a word, setting it on the hot plate and dumping in all manner of unusual foodstuffs, talking quietly under his breath as you pull up the chair and watch, fascinated. He tells you what the vegetables are, mostly, all words you haven't a hope of pronouncing, and laughs lowly when you try, amused by your awful accent. The meat bleeds yellow, and when prompted Karkat tells you that trolls will eat any kind of animal ("beasts", he calls them), no matter how strange or squishy, but that anything with teal blood or higher is off limits, a symbol of the troll hierarchy. Their meal tonight is identified as _rat'chnar_ , which he repeats for you upon request until you get it right-- a kind of spicy, salty, savory stew. As you watch he stirs in half a carton of something that looks like curdled milk, the scent of delicious food wafting up and expanding to fill the room.

And the hallway, apparently, because as the thick liquid in the pot begins to bubble and steam in earnest, someone knocks on the door that you, whoops, may have accidentally left open a crack. A voice calls out in sibilant Alternian when Karkat valiantly ignores the gesture-- the only word you can pick out is the troll's name.

"Watch this and make sure it doesn't boil over," Karkat growls at you, thrusting the spoon into your hand, and before you can open your mouth to tell him that you don't know a single goddamn thing about cooking and have, in fact, burned water on two separate occasions, he's up and at the door, flinging it open to reveal a tall, spectacled troll with bifurcated horns. Your lessons in the language usually leave you up the creek without a paddle in real conversational situations, but it's obvious to tell that Karkat is angry, and this troll finds that hilarious. Karkat's voice rises as the intruder laughs, Karkat pointing back into the room and jabbing a finger in your direction, vitriol infusing his tone.

The new troll seems entirely unfazed by that, though, pushing into the room and switching to lisping English, for which you are grateful-- "Ah, come off it, KK. I jutht want thome food, that'th all. Anyway, how the fuck wath I thuppothed to know you had a guest over?"

"I don't know," Karkat snarls, hands on hips as his friend (enemy? acquaintance?) comes over to sniff at the pot and tease the spoon from your unresisting fingers, stirring the mixture. "Maybe because it's the middle of the goddamn day and I'm still awake?"

The troll sniggers, bringing the spoon up to his mouth to lick and taste, yellow tongue running over black lips. "Yeah, why are you, anyway? You should be getting your beauty retht about now-- god knowth you need it."

"Hey, fuckass, didn't I just say I had company? Anyway, he's sitting right there, asshole, you can at least pretend to have a moderate scrap of decorum and introduce yourself."

"Mmm?" the troll makes an interested little noise in the back of his throat and turns to you again, as though seeing you for the first time, one eyebrow raised. "A human, huh? Buthineth hourth don't thtart till theven, kid. That'th PM, not AM." Karkat smacks him on the shoulder, flushing bright red on his cheeks, and the troll snickers again, brushing him off. "Jutht kidding. I'm Tholluckth Captor, and I'm pretty much thith worthleth nookthtain'th betht-- and only --friend."

"I'm John, John Egbert. Do you, um, work here too?" you hear yourself ask before you can stop yourself, but it's a fair question and oddly the only person who looks mortified by this faux pas is you.

"He does the lights and music for the shows," Karkat explains, snatching the spoon away and using it to ladle stew out into a waiting bowl. "And his name is _Sollux_ , by the way, in case that wasn't imminently clear from his retarded speech impediment."

"Well, it's nice to meet you!" you tell Karkat's friend, quite a bit less uncomfortable now but not appreciating the curious look he's giving you, like you're a new animal on display at the zoo. An oddity, something altogether unexpected.

"Yeah, yeah," Karkat grumps, pressing the bowl and another, smaller spoon at Sollux. "Just take your dinner and get the fuck out before this car crash of a situation starts attracting gawkers, alright?"

Sollux accepts the food but doesn't move to leave, still watching you intently; for a moment you almost fear that he's about to deliver some cliched romance movie ultimatum, something along the lines of _If you hurt Karkat I'll hunt you down and wear your thkin like an overcoat, human_. The kind of classy one-liner that Nic Cage would have before leaving his woman in the care of the enemy. But Sollux just shakes his head and claps a hand over your shoulder, muttering, "Hope you like dealing with conthtant bitch-fethtth, John. Maybe you can take his bellyaching off my plate for awhile, huh?"

Karkat fumes silently from a few paces away and then practically chases him out, shouting, "Yeah, well your sound system sucks shit, bulgelicker!" after him, slamming the door shut hard enough that the whole wall shakes. Then he runs a trembling hand through his untidy hair and turns back to you, looking embarrassed, and also angry. "Fuck, I'm sorry about him, I forgot that some people can't keep their damn crooked noses out of everybody else's private business."

"That's okay," you tell him, earnestly, as he dishes out stew for the two of you, unplugs the hot plate again, and pinches a dusting of some violently red spice or another over the top of each bowl before passing you yours. "I don't mind at all." Not wanting to take up space, you move your operation to the foot of Karkat's bed, which groans and sinks a foot and a half under your weight, letting Karkat take the chair; without looking up at him, you take a bite of meat and vegetable and thick orangish liquid. You want to get to know this man, his friends and his foods and his culture, and this is a good way to start. The stew is almost creamy in texture, the meat tender enough to fall apart on your spoon and in your mouth, the vegetables retaining just enough firmness, everything infused with a hint of spice. It makes your mouth water, and you have just enough time to regret not getting something proper to drink when a silver and gold can of something is tossed down next to you like a grenade into a foxhole.

"It's not grub juice," Karkat grunts by way of explanation when you look up, curiously; he's in the middle of popping the tab on his own can, so you figure it must be safe and set the bowl on your lap while you open it, chugging half of it in one go. It's carbonated, and the fizz goes to your head and tickles your throat as you gulp it down; the aftertaste is something fruity but substantial, with hints of what is very recognizably bacon.

Troll food sure is fucking weird.

But good, you amend, going back to your stew and setting the mystery can on the floor. Within minutes your portion is gone and Karkat is doling out another, and within minutes the whole thing is gone, utterly devoured. You toe the bowl, and the empty can inside it, away from you on the floor and flop back on the bed, arms spread out, eyes closed. You feel full and warm and utterly satisfied, and while it's still early for you, you feel like you could easily curl up in bed with Karkat and just fall asleep, content with everything. "Are you coming to bed?" you ask after a bit, lethargic, looking up to see that Karkat's eyes have been on you; he looks away the second he realizes you've seen, but the damage is done, because you know that look, too, the look of longing and unfathomable, baffling hunger, impossible to define. You felt it that night, when you first saw him-- not just desire, or lust, or arousal, but a hunger to be held, kept safe and warm, to have someone to share things with and tell your secrets to who will understand and love you for it.

"Yes," he tells you, and for all those reasons it shouldn't be altogether surprising when instead of moving next to you, he slides down, down, kneeling where your spread knees are hooked over the edge of the bed and reaching up, flicking the button of your jeans out of its hole and slowly, almost sensually tugging down your zipper. Horrified, you sit up in a flash, taking in his mildly surprised expression and the sight of him leaning over the bed, ready to stroke you to hardness and take you into his mouth again, this time without the hindrance of alcohol in your system.

"What are you doing?" you ask, feeling despair rising, and his surprise is turning to awkward, reflexive anger, face collapsing into a scowl that looks all too practiced.

"This is what you wanted, isn't it?" he demands, voice choked with emotion that he's trying to suppress. "It's what they all want. You're not even the first to go through this whole song and dance dinner-and-a-show charade with me, so cut the shit and let me get you off so I can go to sleep."

You look at him softly, sadly, and surprise him again by gently threading your fingers through his hair, urging him away. It's coarse, like sheep's wool, and you stroke his hair almost reverently, teasing out the knots and tangles as he swallows visibly, eyes wide as he stares up at you. You wonder if he's ever been touched this way before, without desperate, hateful lust or wanting. If he's ever had a tender moment all his own. It makes your heart swell and burst and bleed with secondhand pain, and you move your hand to his cheek, tilting up his jaw and leaning down to press your lips against his.

 _This_ is it. This is what you wanted, and you show him that with pressure that is firm but light, holding him in place even as he stands again and then pushes you back on the bed, his body covering yours and pinning you there. His warm weight is heart enough that you can feel both your pulse and his, racing, his fingers trembling as he copies your gesture, claws resting just under your eye socket, making small indents in your skin as they press down. You're not good at this, though, not good at breathing through your nose and multitasking, and eventually it breaks down, you pulling away and gasping in air that you needed badly.

"That's what I want," you tell him quietly, as he reaches over to turn off the bedside light; even with the drapes, it doesn't really make a difference. "Just that."

And as you pull him in back close again, face pressed into the crook of his neck enough to feel the beat of his heart against your lips, he murmurs, "Alright."

\---

The clock blinks six thirty when you wake up and the sun isn't even properly down yet, but the bed is empty save for you and Karkat's closet is open, revealing wracks of skimpy clothing in red and darker red, racks of boots and skirts and stockings. Karkat stands before his mirror as you rub the sleep out of your eyes, half dressed and half naked, a pair of pink satin panties clinging to his backside and fishnet stockings up to his thighs, but not much else to cover. He steps into another skirt, as you watch, this one more low cut than the article you first saw him in, then buckles on another pair of heels. He can see you through your reflection in the mirror, but if he cares he's not showing it. Instead he pulls a lacy camisole over his head, not long enough to cover his belly, and dusts his cheeks with pink powder. The last step is the application of thick eyeshadow, and then bright scarlet lipstick that you're sure you'd remember him having worn last time, smacking his lips reflexively. Carefully, he cleans up his make up utensils and other assorted articles, the lunch bowls having been put away apparently while you still slept, and leans against the chest of drawers heavily, his eyes closed.

Then, finally, the ultimate step. You were too drunk to notice it, the last time, but he'd been wearing a collar then, and he applies it now, black leather that pulls tight around his neck and must all but choke him, with a silver buckle and tag. Silent, you move up behind him and embrace him, arms meeting around his middle, and he unconsciously leans back into you, letting you take some of the weight it carries. "Is that your symbol?" you ask, looking at the reflection of the tag in the polished glass; the stylized image of two waves, in purple. Immediately you feel stupid when he shakes his head; you might not know what color Karkat bleeds, but elementary understanding of politics tells you that if he were a highblood, practically royalty, he would be sitting in the senator's mansion on the hill right now, sipping wine and not dolled up about to go trolling for customers.

"You have to go," he tells you, a hint of sadness lingering there, and you nod. Your father must be getting worried, after all, even if Dave probably knows enough to feed him some cover story or another by phone, regardless of whether or not he knew the reason behind your absence from school today.

"I wish I didn't," you sigh, face pressed into the contours of his back, now, feeling the muscle shift under skin as he reaches back to touch your shoulder, holding you for a moment before lightly pushing you away. You do not resist the unspoken command, stumbling backward a bit, but you regret that, too. "How much would it be? You know, for the night?" You swallow, hard. "Even if we didn't do anything?"

"Nightly fee is usually two hundred," he tells you, morose. "Give it up, John. Go home."

"Nope," you tell him, leaning up to give him one more kiss, careful not to smear his make up. "Not giving up. Do you remember what I told you last time?"

"Yeah?" he sounds suspicious, you think. Of your motives, or perhaps just of you in general.

"Still stands, bro. I'll talk to you later, okay? And that's a promise. You'd _better_ not forget." You leave him there, staring stunned after you, with a song in your heart as the music begins blasting below; Sollux's handiwork at sound check. It doesn't matter, though, that you can only see him in a place like this. What matters is that you can see him at all.

And that someday, if you have anything to say about it, he won't have to wear chains.


	3. In Which Moirail Pails Are Not a Thing

Sultry, you think, is a good word. You are a Strider, and you know lots of words, many of which are more impressive-sounding synonyms for 'fuck' or coquettish ways to describe your flagrant drug use, in addition to the rough and ready lingo of the mean streets you were born on, but sultry is one of the better ones. Definitely in the top one hundred, describing both the hot-as-hellfire nature of this day and the way your bro-pal trollfriend is currently sprawled across you, her head resting in your lap with milky eyes turned towards a television that she can't even properly see.

"It's hot," she points out, unnecessarily, breathing out the words like a hiss, a prayer, over a commercial for MMM-pop featuring closed captions in English with a smattering of wingdings mixed in for flavor.

"Sultry," you correct in your smoothest voice, trying it out on her; she snorts and shifts on top of you, one arm flopping listlessly over the side of the couch.

"This is not a time for semantics," she warns in her best future-legislacerator tone, the bite of which is muffled by the sopor and heat-sapped lethargy in her voice, each breath labored. She told you once that sopor makes you numb all over, a tingling in the pit of your stomach like its fallen asleep that spreads like a slow burn to your heart, your lungs, your extremities, your mind filled with deep purple fog that insulates and covers, holding you in, dulling the knife-sharp edges of the cruel and unforgiving world. You wouldn't know, being human-- all sopor does is make you sleepy, make you want to curl up and nap forever like a cat grown fat and sleek on fish oil and table scraps, and the oppressive heat of summer is doing that well enough for you already. "Get up and open a window, lazybones."

"Hate to tell you this," you drawl, eyes flicking behind your ever-present glasses to observe the broken air conditioner resting useless in the corner and the blades of the ceiling fan lazily turning, stirring up air tainted with swamp-thick humidity, "but they're all open already." The room smells like smoke, not that you have much of a sense of smell anymore, but you put out your joint half an hour ago, deciding that it was too hot to even get high. What you want now is a beer, ice cold, but the refrigerator is all the way across the apartment, and getting one would require making Terezi move, something that you hesitate to bring up in the middle of _Clerk of Court_ or _Habeas Corpses_ or the so-shitty-it's-not-even-ironic television choice du jour, Troll Judge Judy. Terezi loves them, eats them up like seventy year old blue-haired grandmas watch their soaps, with an almost religious perseverance-- she's been over here every day this week to devour them whole and assimilate their knowledge into her vast mental directory of rulings, since the fuse in her apartment blew out and the television was, as her lusus put it, "Fucking trashed, the goddamn piece of shit."

Not that you're complaining, of course, no matter how much you might gripe at her over it; the truth is you're glad for the company, somewhere in your small and stunted peach pit of a heart. Terezi has a mean streak in her a mile wide, but none of it is for you, the beloved moirail, who she is professedly as pale as the moon for; "But, like, not in a gay way. No homo, Strider." You'd rolled your eyes at her at that declaration, mentally filing homosexuality away as one of the human concepts Terezi will never understand, even if she can cite precedent for all legal rulings since _Brownblood vs. The Board of Education_.

"I think somebody doth protest too much," you'd told her, having just come off one of the innumerable Shakespeare units at school and testing the shoes of a modern-day bard, street poet for the twenty-first century on for size before ditching it a day later for something far less corny and dated, and the two of you dropped it, relationship kept on as it had been before with faint touches and hints here and there, pointing towards something larger beneath the surface that you will never quite understand either, even if you did grow up surrounded by trolls.

So now here you are on the hottest day so far in June (which also happens to be the first day so far in June) with her comfortable in your lap, shushing you harshly as Judy's theme music twangs in the background. "This is the best part," she whispers as the judge mounts the sentencing podium to a chorus of "All rise for Her Honorable Tyranny!" The twisted old crone, horns hooked back and eyes black as midnight, shuffles her papers and pronounces the same sentence as always-- "Guilty!" as though the troll justice system ever finds anyone anything but. The camera pans to a sweating, bug-eyed young troll, a yellowblood, standing with hands tied on a makeshift gallows, the noose already around his neck.

"Please," he whimpers, and you try to remember what his crime was, having zoned out during the body of the show, the Alternian commercials and Terezi in your lap being the only interesting parts. You can come up with nothing, except maybe he stole from a grocery owned by a higherblood, or punched the son of someone important. It's always stupid shit like that, little infractions that no one but a troll would care about. Take one step out of line and you're dead, is the lesson you had hammered into you all the time growing up-- erroneous, because they can't do shit to you, legally. Completely different jurisdictions, and your own court system will mercilessly prosecute any troll-on-human violence to the fullest extent they can justify.

Nevertheless, most of those offenders walk off with seventy-five-to-life without parole, more than can be said for the whimpering teenager rendered in flickering RGB on your cracked and dirty screen, whose pleas turn into a moan and then a sharp snap that terminates all noise, the microphone picking up nothing but static and the creak of the rope as it swings, propelled by gravity.

"Thrilling," you say dully, all grayscale monotone and lackluster stabs at enthusiasm.

"Isn't it, though?" she breathes, and you click off the TV before things can somehow become worse. It's dark in the room now, the only light streaming in through the crack in the window; the sun is setting as you speak, vibrant orange spilling over your floor and illuminating the contours of her face, catching on the sharp red angles of her cheap plastic sunglasses, the ones you picked out for her after she went blind, too little too late. (And how's that for dramatic fucking irony.) Your own breathing is soft, measured, and you wonder if she knows you're looking, if she can smell it in the sweat clinging to the fabric of your t-shirt-- and if so, if she even cares. "When's your brother getting back?" she asks after what seems like a thousand years, the hand whose fingers aren't threaded through the shag carpeting resting on your forearm, claws brushing against pale pink skin.

"He works until midnight tonight," you tell her, glancing at the Sesame Street clock hanging on the wall above the TV alcove. "Seven hours."

"Plenty of time," she purrs, hand migrating up to your shoulder, your chest, resting just above your heart. This is not, you suspect, how moirails are supposed to act.

But as she leans up and kisses you, sweet sopor residue on her lips like honeyed wine, you can't find the hubris within you to care.

\---

Hands in your hair, on your face, holding you tight and pulling you close as hot breath pants into your mouth, the both of you strangely quiet save for the rustle of clothes and the creak of the bed frame beneath you, rusted box springs protesting every small movement-- and, of course, the soft but steady rumbling in his chest, so like a growl, so like a purr, that professes his enjoyment. You haven't initiated it once yet, these last blissful days since you walked off the podium at the local civic center and tossed your cap in the air with half a thousand other lost and scared children with equally bright, confusing futures ahead of them. It's always him, always Karkat, pushing you down against the bed and kissing you like he's trying to suck out your breath and then falling asleep with his head on your chest, rumbling away like someone left his motor running.

They do that, cats. Suck your breath out, that is. Your Nana used to tell you stories from the old country when you were little, of feline familiars that would come in the night and sift out your soul from between your lips, but you never believed them. Still don't, because it's superstitious nonsense, but that's what it reminds you of at six in the evening when you've been awake for two hours, petting his hair between his horns as he slumbers, exhausted from entertaining you, though he needn't try so hard. You're not that hard to please, though if forced to guess, you would hazard to say that he's been trying, working hard to keep his voice down in your presence and put on a play of contentedness, with you and the world-- you rather wish he would stop it, actually. You never notice it when he's awake, and it's only when he sleeps that you can feel the difference, how the tension drains out of strained sinews and tight, corded muscles in his neck and back, relaxing entirely.

These moments you have together are odd, undeniably, though he never refuses to see you, always lets you in when it's one in the afternoon and you've come by to talk or walk down to the trashed and weed-choked public park ("probably radioactive, don't know why the fuck you wanted to come here-- hey, fuckass, pigeons are for eating, not petting!") or make him cup ramen on his hot plate. He never turns you away even if there are deep maroon-tinted bags under his eyes and his hair hangs in tangled shocks over his forehead, skin sallow and limbs listless. On those days you say nothing but pull him back to bed, and the addition of your body warmth always seems to make him lighter.

Dave doesn't know where you're going all this time, why you aren't hanging with him so frequently anymore and have instead left him to the care of his mentally-unstable moirail who somehow managed to graduate with honors and get herself into the state university's law division for this fall. But he has hinted, and you wish you could tell him: No, Dave, the two of you have never had sex. The truth is that you haven't done a damn thing with him in nearly two and a half weeks but kiss, and that's fine with you, really, because what you want is his love and affection, not his cock or his lips wrapped around you, as nice as those things would be. You're fine just getting to know him, watching as some of the stiffness melts out of his demeanor, as piece by piece the act falls away. Someday you'll be able to be with him all the time, the real him, the Karkat that none of his clients ever have a chance to see and know and love.

Beyond anything, you're honored just to be able to know him, no matter who or what he is.

To that end, tonight you have decided to drop in on one of his shows. After he's woken and kissed you good evening, lips fumbling and hesitant with drugging remnants of sleep, and after you've watched him dress with sadness in your heart, scraps of silken cloth drawn over skin you want to stroke with dragging slowness; after this is done you slip your sneakers back on, trail your fingertips down his arm for one last time, a lingering look between you, and slip out, false confidence filling you. Down the steps and to what you now know the performers refer to as "the showroom", where the house lights are just clicking off. You wave offhand to Sollux in his box above the noise, but his attentions are elsewhere, and in a heartbeat the empty stage is illuminated in a disco-rave frenzy of flashing orange and yellow. You press on, a little further, to the place where all the dirty, tarnished souls gravitate, collapsing into a stool that sticks to the seat of your pants when you shift against it.

Strider, who has been cleaning glasses behind the bar, nods at you; for a second you get a flash of red eyes over the tops of his shades, and then the glasses are firmly in place again, his expression empty and stoic. Nevertheless, you are fairly certain that he is watching you. "I just want to see him," you say, your voice low because the music hasn't clicked on yet and it is a luxury you can yet afford. "I don't want him to feel like I'm ashamed, you know? Because he shouldn't. It's not a big deal."

You feel awfully and adult and mature after delivering this little speech, but Strider just watches for a moment more and shakes his head at you, the movement small and understated but condemning as he moves to crack a bottle of the same green concoction you imbibed the first night and pushing a glassful over the counter at you. You accept, feeling still more mature if a bit slighted, because whatever he thinks of you, Dave is a friend of yours and friends of Dave always drink free at establishments the older Strider is employed at. You sip this time, taking it slow, trying not to lose too much of yourself too quickly, and the drink is half gone by the time the music starts and the paying customers begin filing in.

The first act doesn't interest you, really, a double-team of two maroonbloods that the audience offers a few screeches for and about a dollar fifty thrown onto the stage, nothing more. It's still early, and there's a sense that the real entertainment hasn't started yet. The rest of your drink goes, and you politely refuse another, your mind already filled with comforting fuzz as the music lowers sensually. Inquisitive, you glance up at the stage, and you know you won't have to wait long; here is Karkat now, strutting out on stage with fire normally repressed, in his traditional red garb. And now you are caught in a moral conundrum, because the other patrons are whooping and hollering, and you want to show your support-- but would that make you like them, a chauvinist only out for his body?

You are pondering this dilemma when he happens to catch your eye, and you see his expression change. For an instant he is utterly devastated, his confidence shattered, and there is shame written on his face as clear as starlight, cheeks flushing and eyes closing as he moves to embrace the pole. The bottom falls out of your stomach as you watch him, and then note as he dismounts the stage, moments later, unable to look at you as a fat and balding man in a sweat-stained sportscoat grabs him by the elbow and drags him past, towards the stairs. You reach for him as he slips past, but he ignores you, free hand balled to a fist at his side, and you know that you have fucked up, and bad.

Hands shaking, you accept another drink from Strider, downed in one gulp. It is a mystery how you make it home after that, though you have the vague feeling that a lot of sobbing and clinging and Bro's powerful arms around your shoulders heaving you up into the pine-scented passenger seat of his Camero might have had something to do with it.

The next day, as you are sleeping off your hangover, the phone rings, and you are not even allowed to greet your caller before a too-familiar voice snarls, " _Never_ follow me to work again." You fall back asleep with sickness in your soul and the phone screaming its dial tone at you from beside your skull, where you dropped it in despair.

Twenty-four hours pass before you get up the initiative to try again, fielding the long bus ride from your Pleasantville-esque neighborhood to Karkat's slum town with the dull ache of nervousness beating in your breast. You knock on his door once, twice, three times before calling out his name, quietly so as not to disturb anyone else on the floor.

Nothing.

A fourth time you try, and silence meets you, enough that the worry bubbles over into a small sob, your fingers curling against the grain of the door as you contemplate how one action, draped in good intentions, could so destroy the things you'd cherished and had been working for. It feels like poetry, like a metaphor. Like a bad joke.

It is when you slump forward to let your forehead rest despondently against the stubbornly closed portal that long, slim fingers tap your shoulder lightly, begging your attention. You turn to look and find Sollux there, 3D glasses hiding a subtle look of consternation. "John? What're you doing here?" Then he blinks and quickly amends, "I mean, it'th not like you haven't been in and out of here for dayth or anything, but it'th the middle of the afternoon."

"I was looking for Karkat," you tell him, and then laugh humorlessly because fuck, why else would you have dragged yourself all the way down here? "I... I messed up, Sollux. I think badly. Did he say anything about me? You know, the other night?"

Sollux shakes his head, a short, sharp pull that leaves no doubt in your mind that he must be lying. "No. Look, don't worry about it, alright? He'th out right now, that'th all. You could wait for him, but it'll probably be a few hours; don't think it'th worth it."

Your face falls, unconsciously, and your gaze slides down to the floor and Sollux's mismatched shoes, one whitewashed and the other black as tar; "That's okay," you tell him. "I'll wait." You don't think you can do anything else, honestly, but Sollux appears to have different plans, rapping you on the side of the head with his knuckles and gesturing back in the direction of the stairs.

"Well, I wath trying to thugar-coat it for you, but now you're jutht being thilly-- he'th out with the big bothh, okay? And then he hath work, which doethn't leave much time to talk to you. Thorry." Your dejected look must be magnified tenfold, because he points towards the stairwell again and begins towards it, slouching over with hands stuffed deep in the pockets of dress pants as dark as an oil slick, the material shining in the dim light. "You came all the way down here, though, tho come on; I'll buy you a thoda." He grins, all layers of overlapping fangs and teasing mirth-- "Or a grub juith, if you'd prefer."

"Heeeeey!" you whine, suddenly indignant, and jog the first few paces to catch up to him, the sadness and rot in your heart momentarily forgotten. "I'm as much for cultural sensitivity as the next guy, but that's gross, dude. It'd be like me going around chugging cartons of baby blood or something."

"Not putting it patht you," Sollux comments, snorting. "You'll date KK, for a thertain value of "date", tho you clearly have no thtandardth-- and I thay that bathed on thikth yearth of being grathed with hith magnifithent prethenth, not anything elth you might be inclined to judge me for."

Out on the street there is silence that fills with your voices, echoing off crumbling walls and long-empty spaces. You follow Sollux like a lap dog at its master's heels, confused but cheerful, out the back door and down to the water where you wait at the edge of the boardwalk, Sollux going on ahead and waving you after as you hesitate. The pier extends out into the gently moving river, flowing like a half-congealed oil slick white capped with turbulent and poisoned froth around chunks of driftwood haphazardly assembled into a walkway. Sollux makes his way to the very end, where an inexplicable soda machine rests, one of the old RC cola machines but re-purposed for trollish use and furnished with all manner of strange concoctions along the lines of Bridgeworth's Original Goat's Blood Rootbeer and Sopor Soda, which has to be illegal even by troll standards. Sollux dumps a pocketful of change into the slot with a series of empty clinks and hits a button twice, tapping his foot impatiently as the machine whirs and clanks, eventually spitting out neon green cans; one of them is thrown artfully at your head, and you barely catch it, diving like a football cornerback to make the save.

Sollux has already moved himself, shifted to sling his legs over the edge of the boardwalk, kicking into three feet of open air above the swollen river. This boardwalk, you seem to recall, was built high so that docking ships could let off their human cargo with little fuss, in days gone by when yours was a gleaming, glamorous city that anyone could be proud of. Now it languishes in disrepair, the boards cracked and grayed and rotting, hollowed by termites and the passage of time, replete with soda machines and an old automated fortuneteller's box. Sollux watches the city instead of you, the high waves rolling by and lapping at the struts holding you in place above the river, the bustling traffic across and over the opposing shore, buildings still bright and shining posing there, reflecting light of the sun and dreams not yet dead and dying, drawn not from the poisoned well of institutionalized poverty and profiling but the warm and welcoming pool of riches these men, these trolls, will never dare to dream of.

"He wouldn't want me to tell you where he goeth thometimeth," Sollux starts after a moment, after you've uncomfortably gotten down beside him and popped the can on your melon-raspberry-fish sticks soda, taking your honored place a good foot and a half apart, "tho I won't. He wouldn't want me to tell you how he feelth about you either, which ith good becauth I'm thure I don't know the depth of it, but that'th not important, not really. Then again, what I want to tell you ithn't important either."

He sucks in a deep breath and you just nod a fraction, eyes wide as streetlamps in the dark, taking another generous swig of your beverage to excuse not saying anything. In the space between words there is only the gentle hiss and slap of water on wood, of the slight breeze as it shifts and pulls at the corners of your clothes; you have never been one for gods, but these moments feel near to holy, you cannot deny.

"We uthed to thelebrate hith wriggling day every thweep, him and hith luthuth and I. It'th not thomething that motht trollth did or would have done, becauth motht trollth don't give a fuck. What'th another year, really, when a lot of uth have to grow up right out of the gate?

"But Karkat'th luthuth wath different, becauth Karkat'th luthuth wath human. It almotht never happenth that way, you know, but almotht ithn't never, quite, and Karkat wath happy, for awhile. They were poor but every thweep without fail he'd get a cake and at leatht one good prethent, a new romance novel or pocketknife or thuchlike." Sollux's solemn face falls even lower, to a heavy frown. "That changed when hith luthuth... went away. Everything did. He wath of age, on hith own, vulnerable, and by the time hith nektht wriggling day rolled around, well, there wathn't a hell of a lot to thelebrate, anymore."

Then Sollux is quiet, and all that speaks between you is the voice of the wind, soft but insistent, tugging down at the fraying edges of your mind like the reins of a horse, pulling you onto a different, crooked, spiraling path. You swallow thickly past the lump in your throat, greasing the way with the last dregs of your surprisingly refreshing drink, and crumple the can in tense fingers, staring at the cheap and tarnished aluminum in your palms, the blue eyes warped and reflected back at you.

"When is it? His birthday, I mean?" you ask, quietly, with no hint of cultural sensitivity, and out of the corner of your eye and reflected in the rushing water below you can see his smirk, smug as the only tomcat in an alley of queens.

"The twelfth. Why?"

And the thing is, he knows. He knows why, and you know he knows, and he knows you know he knows. There's this strange dance you must go through with trolls, you are beginning to realize, where you never, ever utter the truth of your feelings and cloak everything in shades of deception to hide what you really mean. If you are adept, if you are lucky, you can pull away the veils of bullshit and see the genuine statement hiding inside; _Here is how you can fix this._

You refuse to play this game, partially because it is tiring to the nth degree and partially because this man is important to Karkat, and you promised yourself-- no more lies, not to him. Not to him and not to anyone who is an extension of him, a soul of his soul, mated in the river of Heaven and fated to be, born under the same stars. You offer him a grin, instead, all teeth and the prankster's chaos; only one can hold this role, and you are the trickster, it is you.

"Because I'm going to give him the one thing that no one else will."

The look on Sollux's face, slyly beatific in the way that only shady, emotionally closed-off trolls can be, tells you that for once, you have found the right answer.

\---

In an effort to conserve money, you no longer take the bus. This has lead to a week and a half of bumming rides off Dave, calling in age-old favors carefully documented on a legal pad courtesy of Terezi ("Gogdamn it, woman, you're supposed to use your Pheonix Wright: Troll Attorney skills for evil, not good!") or winning bets at cards, though you had to call that off when he accused you of pulling out your trick deck. Dave drives you back and forth keeping his head down in your neighborhood ("Not ashamed of them looking, Christ, what do I care if they think I'm a gangbanger, but it's hard to live a fuck the police lifestyle in a place that actually, you know, fucking has police"), to the pawn shop and your Nanna's house out in the Village, hauling televisions (your own) and original Van Gouge knock-offs of cats in every color of the rainbow (hers) to augment the already pretty good salvage from the collision of your father's hammer and Mr. Porksnout (there were no survivors, though shrapnel went everywhere).

The good part is that Dave never asks why. He never looks at you over the tops of his shades with that pitying look that would be awkward if he were really all he pretends to be, staring straight into your soul with those devil's eyes and stripping you, laying you bare. Sometimes you feel like he can see you anyway, every inch of you, flayed skin and breaking bones and curdled, sour marrow, and the sweet song caged in your heart, something they will never take from you-- but those moments never last long, nothing but fleeting, mirrored glances in the car as he trundles you back across the Stone Bridge, the trolls' bridge, back into the East end of town. The fact is that Dave doesn't care, maybe doesn't even know for sure, but if he does then he's still no better a man than you. There's no high horse to fall off of, no upper path to take when you have crawled on your hands and knees down to the bottom and are content to wallow there in the muck and mire, so long as _his_ hand is yours to clasp.

You feel you should tell him, though, when evening is falling on a cloudy night, the sky painted puffy periwinkle blue and wild lilac, the air perfumed with spice and the scent of car exhaust and sex as you roll into the green light district, where the only state of being is go, go, go. "Remember that club we went to on my birthday?" you ask when he queries "Where to?", cheeks flushed only lightly. You practiced this over and over until you felt you had it right, telling yourself that Dave won't judge, that Striders don't make it their business to give a fuck about what happens between someone else's sheets unless their girl (or guy) is involved-- and rarely even then unless they themselves are not. Now the bottom is being eaten away from your stomach again as Dave kicks the ailing automobile up a gear and its battered frame skips and lurches forward, a deathtrap on wheels. "Um. There."

"Cool," Dave says, and that's it. No, "I'll drop in too, say hi to the girls." No lingering looks of condemnation. Just a little shrug, unpronounced, and that word, unaccented. "Cool."

Yes, you think as he drops you off out front, cool as mint patties, cool as ice cream on a hot summer day, cool as the briny air coming off the river not five hundred yards from you. Cool as the silver stars twinkling in their distant sky. Cool as the brass of the doorknob against your sweating palm.

Here goes nothing.

There is two hundred and fifty dollars stuffed in the breast pocket of your father's awful hand-me-down brown houndstooth sports coat and a blue and orange plaid tie around your neck and not a single person with unironic fashion sense in your immediate circle of friends, other than Terezi who solves nearly all clothing-related problems by grabbing whatever is nearest to her at the moment that smells reasonably clean, and who has been known to show up to school in an offensively orange zoot suit from time to time. There is also a very angry, very sexy troll pointedly looking anywhere but at you as you sit at your stained and sticky table, running your fingers through your hair and wondering if you should have thought to lift one of your father's very stylish fedoras as well, though, as Dave would say, you are not going for the 50's wifebeater gentleman look here. Equius comes when you beckon him wordlessly over with the crook of a finger, shrugging a shoulder towards Karkat, and money is exchanged in dim half-darkness, the roll disappearing from your fumbling fingers to his pocket with a distinct lack of panache on your part. By the time Equius is leading your man down from the stage and over to you, the already flagging flowers you brought have wilted in earnest, bulbed heads browned and drooping, but you cannot care much about that. They are not, after all, Karkat's present.

The glare he shoots you is full of bile and the bittersweet of loving betrayal, of hopes dashed open on the rocks of common sense, borne down towards the bottom of the sea by the albatross of harsh reality. Equius leaves you in the front parlor, where moths are lazily but doggedly attacking the flickering ceiling light, the summer air wafting in through the open door and carrying away some of your sweat, some of his shame. You try to follow and guess at his thought processes as he stands with arms crossed over his chest, trembling ever so slightly and trying not to show it-- he is a good actor, but not that much, not when he's angry. You open your mouth to speak and he snarls, vile invective choking him, the noose around his neck. "Stop," he hisses, and your mouth snaps closed again. "Just stop. Don't speak to me. Don't tell me more lies, don't make believe that you _fucking_ care, just like the rest of them. I don't hate them, you know that? But I can goddamn well hate you, because you lied to me. I can't stop you from touching me, you paid for that, but don't ever think that buys you the right to fucking jerk me around like that again."

Now it is you who are shaking, as you gulp down a throatful of your own bile something uncomfortable pricking at the corners of your eyes. "I just came to say happy birthday, Karkat," you tell him, nearly a whisper, and then amend, "Happy wriggling day, I mean. I'll... leave now, if that's what you want. I already gave you your present."

You hover there a moment more, rocking back and forth on your heels as Karkat blinks at you, dumbfounded but suspicious; you watch the gears turn behind his eyes until they widen near-to imperceptibly, pupils dilating just enough to be noticeable. "You... bought me," he rasps, taking a cautious, skittish step towards you again.

"Everyone needs a night off," you tell him, smiling sadly, and then suddenly his lips are on yours, his hands gripping your wrists so tight it hurts and drawing them up to his chest as he sucks the life out of you, cherry-red lipstick smearing over your ghostly pale skin. Then you are groaning into the kiss and his tongue is in your mouth, the clawed fingers of one hand twisting in your hair and pulling you closer as your back hits the wall and then he remembers himself and it is your weight being dragged against him against the dreadful peeling pastel wallpaper and the bass from the music is thump, thump, thumping in time with your heart as thickened blood pumps through you and.

"Wait," you gasp, forcibly wrenching yourself away from him as his other hand moves down to stroke your side and then lower, hooking in your belt loops and pulling only slightly. "Wait, Karkat, this wasn't... honest, this wasn't my intention." You have no words for him, no breath to spare, especially when his mouth is now on your throat, rough, wet tongue swabbing your Adam's apple and swiping the salt from your skin, not biting down or sucking hard enough to leave a mark; that is not the province of his station. "I t-t-t _old you_ ," you manage to stutter out, words collapsing into a hopeless moan, "I don't... this isn't... you don't have to work tonight, Karkat! Doesn't that make you happy?"

"Yes," he grunts, and then kisses you again, a bit more hesitantly this time, leaving you more room to pull away.

"So what are you doing now?"

"Not working." His hands are up and teasing the hem of your pressed white button-up shirt out of your pants, palms sliding up your chest to feel you, and you don't think you've ever done this before. You've touched him plenty, but the reverse is never true aside from hungry kisses and his arms around you as he sleeps, and this is a new thing, those razor points trailing down barely defined pectorals and abdominal muscles gone tense with nerves. "I want to go out," he adds after a moment filled deliciously with nothing but your unthinking whimpers, "but I'm going to get changed, first." You nod. "In my room." Another nod. "With the door closed." Another nod, and a sympathetic smile. "And you're coming with me."

Your grin disappears and your bobble-head like motions stop so short you think you just gave yourself whiplash. "Please don't," you tell him, voice squeaking like rusty bed springs or the things that hide in the night. "I don't want to be that guy."

"You goddamn idiot," he tells you, and for a second you could swear that there's a hint of fondness, buried in there somewhere. "If you were, I wouldn't be offering to do this."

When you kiss him again, the hysterical, flailing part of your brain thinks that he tastes like honey and possibilities.

\---

Karkat looks different in real clothes, different from the normal person you've seen before, different lit by the oily orange glow of streetlights and the alternating neon of a thousand sparking signs. The city is alive around you, alive and stirring, buzzing, but all you can see is him, Karkat in his black t-shirt and shitty beat-up sneakers, no collar around his neck, no borrowed rings on his fingers, no weight of the world on his shoulders. Today is for somebody else's Atlas, today is a problem that cannot be solved, and you slip your hand into his, neither of you leading, as around you the city cools and settles and simmers, never sleeping, never dying.

Nothing need be spoken, now, as magic lights your way and the wind dances around you, carrying you helplessly towards the river, towards the boardwalk, dark water reflecting the clouds and stars. "Trolls came from the sea, you know," he tells you, staring out at the ancestral water as though he'd like to go wading, return himself to the broth that bore him, and his ancestors, since so long ago. "And some of them are so damn haughty about it."

You squeeze his fingers, trying not to stare too conspicuously. "You sound like you think about this a lot."

He sounds morose. "Incessantly."

"I can't help that, I'm afraid."

Golden eyes that shine deep as a cat's meet yours, and then he turns away, back to the choppy water and long forgotten dreams. "Egbert, you don't know the half of what you are."


End file.
